3 ms·

The single smartest person I know (an actual genius, mensa, gifted schools, etc) works in a crappy web agency and he's chronically underpaid. Tons of smart pe

The single smartest person I know (an actual genius, mensa, gifted schools, etc) works in a crappy web agency and he's chronically underpaid. Tons of smart people I know are doing mediocre jobs. The fact someone is tackling hard problems doesn't make them the smartest people in the room, you need a combination of risk taking and smart in life.

sureglymop 4y ago
Generally what's needed to climb career ladders are social skills and networking skills. Coincidentally many smart people are not neurotypical and struggle with that. The problem is the "concept" of meritocracy. Many smart people may face significant amounts of adversity or may due to their circumstances be stuck in poverty. One example of that are people with adhd, autism, asperger's etc, many of whom score high on iq tests. But due to their handicaps they still struggle significantly more than neurotypical people because they are a minority.
- badpun 4y ago
  > Generally what's needed to climb career ladders are social skills and networking skills. And also, just the will to climb. Smart people often look at the big picture and come to view the rat race as pointless, thus staying on a lower rung of the ladder for life.
dredmorbius 4y ago
See the story of William James Sidis: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis> Child prodigy, IQ assessed between 250 and 300, contemporary, classmate, and friend of Norbert Wiener (father of cybernetics, also a child prodigy), and ended up ... making a life's work of studying bus transfers. As in the tickets, not commute patterns themselves. Several HN submissions though no substantive discussion: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=William%20James%20Sidis https://hn.algolia.com/?q=William%20James%20Sidis> Sidis Archives: <https://www.sidis.net/ https://www.sidis.net/>
- mercutio2 4y ago
  IQ of 250 is a meaningless statement. IQ of 200 means “better than 1/10 billion”. There aren’t enough humans to make a statement like that meaningful, and an IQ of 250 is positing something like “smarter than all humans living in the solar system centuries from now”. Maybe when we make AGIs in bulk we’ll be able to talk about analytical capacity on some more meaningful scale than IQ, but for now, numbers like you gave attached to a human are just silly hyperbole.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    1. <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=hIdsjNGCGz4 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=hIdsjNGCGz4> 2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21078083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21078083>

sureglymop 4y ago

Generally what's needed to climb career ladders are social skills and networking skills. Coincidentally many smart people are not neurotypical and struggle with that. The problem is the "concept" of meritocracy. Many smart people may face significant amounts of adversity or may due to their circumstances be stuck in poverty. One example of that are people with adhd, autism, asperger's etc, many of whom score high on iq tests. But due to their handicaps they still struggle significantly more than neurotypical people because they are a minority.

badpun 4y ago
> Generally what's needed to climb career ladders are social skills and networking skills. And also, just the will to climb. Smart people often look at the big picture and come to view the rat race as pointless, thus staying on a lower rung of the ladder for life.

dredmorbius 4y ago

See the story of William James Sidis: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis> Child prodigy, IQ assessed between 250 and 300, contemporary, classmate, and friend of Norbert Wiener (father of cybernetics, also a child prodigy), and ended up ... making a life's work of studying bus transfers. As in the tickets, not commute patterns themselves. Several HN submissions though no substantive discussion: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=William%20James%20Sidis https://hn.algolia.com/?q=William%20James%20Sidis> Sidis Archives: <https://www.sidis.net/ https://www.sidis.net/>

mercutio2 4y ago
IQ of 250 is a meaningless statement. IQ of 200 means “better than 1/10 billion”. There aren’t enough humans to make a statement like that meaningful, and an IQ of 250 is positing something like “smarter than all humans living in the solar system centuries from now”. Maybe when we make AGIs in bulk we’ll be able to talk about analytical capacity on some more meaningful scale than IQ, but for now, numbers like you gave attached to a human are just silly hyperbole.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  1. <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=hIdsjNGCGz4 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=hIdsjNGCGz4> 2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21078083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21078083>